On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks

atmosphere of the Bodleian was

unscrewed the top very slowly, there could be a gentle decompression, but as soon as I loosened the top a little, it blew;

of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone’s life.

Nothing I could say could repel or shock her; there seemed no limit to her powers of sympathy and understanding, the generosity and spaciousness of her heart.

(I regard all neurology, everything, as a sort of adventure!)

The interviewer commented on how well these people had adjusted to the painful, traumatic years of their childhood. “Yes,” said one man. “But I still have trouble with the three Bs: bonding, belonging, and believing.” I think this is also true, to some extent, for me.

Each of us, I had written, constructs and lives a “narrative” and is defined by this narrative.

I once asked him how he wanted to be remembered, and he said, “As a teacher.”

She had retained, despite advancing disease and unpredictable reactions to L-dopa, all of her humor, her love of life, her spunkiness.

He knew the human, the inward side of his patients no less than their bodies and felt he could not treat one without the other.

Pop also had a deep and lifelong passion for music.

man of knowledge, a wise elder.

There were some autistic people who might have developmental delays and a certain inability to read social cues, but they were fully capable and perhaps even

not as neurological deficits so much as different modes of being, ones with their own unique dispositions and needs.

An Anthropologist on Mars, their “conditions” were fundamental to their lives and often a source of originality or creativity. I subtitled the book “Seven Paradoxical Tales,” because all of its subjects had found or created unexpected adaptations to their disorders; all had compensating gifts of different sorts.

We both had a special interest in the brain’s visual system and how our powers of visual recognition could be undermined by injury or disease or tricked by visual illusions.4 He felt strongly that perceptions were not just simple reproductions of sensory data from the eye or ear but had to be “constructed” by the brain, a construction involving the collaboration of many subsystems in the brain and constantly informed by memory, probability, and expectations.

Stephen Jay Gould. I had read his Ontogeny and Phylogeny and many of his monthly articles in Natural History magazine. I particularly liked his 1989 book Wonderful Life, which gave one a tremendous feeling for the sheer luck—good or bad—which can befall any species of animal or plant and the huge role that chance plays in evolution.

violent) explosion as the six of us came together. The thirteen-hour television show, called A Glorious Accident, was a huge hit in the Netherlands, and a transcript of the show became a best-selling book.

By the time I met her in 1993, Temple was no longer speaking of “curing” autism but of the strengths and weaknesses people with autism may show.

experiment are crucially important here—neural Darwinism is essentially experiential selection.

neuronal constellations or maps could change in a matter of seconds as the animal learned or adapted

This is Edelman’s picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music.

Edelman’s theory was the first truly global theory of mind and consciousness, the first biological theory of individuality and autonomy. I thought, “Thank God I have lived to hear this theory.”

piece of cake.” This led to passionate discussions

of English

accounted a “resident alien.” This accorded with how

The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing.